the (not so) new mccarthyism

Palestinians have never had the luxury of free speech abroad

Across the US, in the past week, a number of Palestinian students have been arrested by Homeland Security, following an executive order issued by President Trump, issued on 30th January, entitled ‘Combatting Anti-Semitism in the United States’.

The order calls for the removal of ‘resident aliens’ who are deemed to have taken part in protests across ‘leftist, anti-American colleges and universities’.

“To all the resident aliens who joined in the pro-jihadist protests, we put you on notice: come 2025, we will find you, and we will deport you. I will also quickly cancel the student visas of all Hamas sympathizers on college campuses, which have been infested with radicalism like never before.”

In practise this has led to the detention of Syrian-born green card holder Mahmoud Khalil, accused of leading the on campus protests in Columbia; the revoking of Indian-born Rajani Srinivasan’s F-1 visa after accusations that they had taken part in those same protests (proof of this was offered in the form of a video of Rajani, taken at the protests, leading a “we want freedom, Palestines freedom, our human rights and freedom” chant); and the detention of Leqaa Kordia, a Palestinian born Columbia student who also took part in the on-campus protests last year.

These arrests and deportations are likely the first of many to come, with Secretary of State Marco Rubio saying on Friday that “in the days to come, you should expect more visas will be revoked as we identify people that we should have never allowed in”. This rhetoric was echoed by DHS, who issued a press release stating “it is a privilege to be granted a visa to live and study in the United States of America. When you advocate for violence and terrorism that privilege should be revoked, and you should not be in this country”.

This comes amid a wide-scale government crackdown on Columbia University, purportedly because of its handling of protests last year. Over $400m worth of grants have been withdrawn from the University until it meets a set of conditions set by Trump, that includes immediately placing its Middle East, South Asian, and African Studies Department into academic receivership.

The University has additionally been placed under federal investigation by the Department of Homeland Security, who claim they are investigating “whether Columbia’s handling of earlier incidents violated civil rights laws and included terrorism crimes.”

While this level of repression — the use of a 1950s law that was originally designed to allow the McCarthyite suppression and removal of Eastern European Jews suspected of Communist sympathies — is new and deeply concerning, the overarching framework it emerges from is not.

The concept of a security threat, or advocacy for terrorism, in these instances are as loose as they have ever been with respect to Palestinian advocacy. For decades, these terms have been used by various bodies to shut down legitimate protest and support of basic human rights and freedoms for Palestinians, and to paint opposition to Israeli human rights violations and occupation as terrorist anti-semitism.

Support for proscribed organisations is a crime in the US, but these students are not alleged to have committed crimes — instead, they’re alleged to have partaken in ‘Hamas aligned’ activism, a term that has long since become a euphemism for any expressed support for the Palestinian people.

For many people working in the space, the culture of fear that exists around communicating openly in support of Palestine is not new.

After graduating from university, I spent some time working in public affairs for a Palestinian legal advocacy organisation; where lawyers and legal experts spent their time each week tirelessly working to advocate for the Palestinian victims of Israeli violence, and I inanely spent my time cross-checking every word in a press release, and every term in an open letter, to ensure that the endless hours of tireless work on my colleagues part wasn’t permanently undermined by a single stray word or punctuation mark that might have been seized upon by pro-Israeli activists, who for years in the UK have worked to establish that same framing — that support for Palestinians is support for terrorism and antisemitism — within British politics.

With unnerving speed, cross-sectoral consensus regarding Israels exceeding of the legal benchmarks for apartheid became anti-semitic, civil society organisations who collected evidence of Israeli crimes became terrorist entities, criticism of Israels deliberate targeting of Palestinian journalists became blood libel.

We saw this in the UK last year, when former Minister of State for Immigration, Robert Jenrick MP, called for the arrest and deportation of Palestinian activist Mohammed El-Kurd, following doctored claims that his speech at a pro-Palestine protest in London that had rallied against the normalisation of the massacres of Gazans, had called for massacres of Israelis instead. And we see it now, weekly, on Britains most watched news channel, as GB News presenter Ben Leo regularly opens his weekend show with calls for the prohibition of all Palestinians from the UK.

This culture of fear and suppression is dangerous; on a micro level because it poisons the discourse — those least likely to fear accusations of terrorism and anti-semitism are often both the most privileged, and most ideologically noxious voices, and under such an environment are likely to be the ones that speak first and loudest.

But far more importantly, on a macro level, because it robs Palestinians of the ability to advocate for themselves without putting themselves at risk of serious state repression. It’s not that this isn’t something Palestinians are used to — Palestinian activism was born and bred under the immense repression of the Israeli state, where administrative detention is a fact of life, and Israeli courts try Palestinians of crimes with a 99.7% conviction rate.

Rather, it’s because as people resident in purportedly democratic countries, where residents and citizens are supposedly subject to the rule of law, we should be so ashamed as to feel physically ill that we follow in the footsteps of despotic regimes in our approach to Palestinian activism.

While JD Vance uses his visits abroad to tell European leaders that the real threat we face — the real danger — isn’t Russia, but rather a retreat from the ‘fundamental values’ of free speech, his government at home is launching one of the most repressive crackdowns on the right to speech and protest in modern times.

That the official twitter account of the ‘leader of the free world’ sees fit to post a picture of a man — whose grandmother was violently and forcibly expelled from Ṭabariyyā in 1948, whose family spent decades living in exile in refugee camps in Syria, who is accused of no crime, just support for the people from which he descends — with the caption ‘Shalom Mahmoud’, while revoking his right to live in the United States under a law originally brought on to the books in order to allow for the persecution of Eastern European Jews in the midst of the USs post WW2 anti-semitism (painful ironies), should not be accepted by any of us as a fact of life.

That British media still sees fit to platform people who feel comfortable continually painting support for Palestinian people at marches in London as terrorism should not be accepted.

That the Conservative commentariat class remains full to the brim with those who are willing to paint any critique of Israel as antisemitic should not be accepted.

It is imperative at this point that advocates for the Palestinian cause do not allow fatigue to set in. If you have made the case against these attempts to shut down Palestinian activism one hundred times, you must make it for the one hundred and first.

This is particularly true for those of us with the privilege to do so — those of us in the US and UK who do not have insecure immigration status, or financial status, or who do not otherwise stand to be materially harmed by the weight these accusations carry.

It’s hard to emphasise, without feeling preachy or frankly sounding like a bit of a self important twat, how genuinely important is it to push back, decisively, against this McCarthyist line from the US government. But it could not be more so.

These people, who build their political legitimacy on the backs of the repression of their political opponents who have broken no laws, are dangerous. Normalising them, despite the political power they hold in the US, or the mainstream media exposure they have in the UK, is dangerous.

If you care about free speech, or rule of law, or human rights, learn to coherently and enthusiastically make an articulate case against them. Because the existence of as cogent, focussed, and open a threat to all three of those values, on both sides of the Atlantic, is rare. And if we can’t, as progressives (or otherwise) pose convincing opposition to frankly naked fascism, then we don’t stand a chance when it comes to the coded, cloak and dagger, dog-whistle politics that often accompanies it from the same actors.

As JD Vance so succinctly put it, in his address to the Munich Security Conference; “Democracy rests on the sacred principle that the voice of the people matters. There's no room for firewalls. You either uphold the principle or you don't”.